International Women's Day 1997
A history to be proud of
by Kamala Emanual & Tracey Snoeck - Newcastle

For centuries women have been struggling against their oppression. For more than a century these struggles have involved millions of women in campaigns for liberation, taking up issues which affect us as women, workers, people of colour, people wanting peace and justice.

In 1909, women textile workers in New York worked long hours for little pay. When some were sacked on suspicion of supporting unionisation, a strike that began as a small walk-out grew to become the "Uprising of Twenty Thousand". United despite hunger, cold, evictions, physical assault and arrests, after 13 weeks the mostly women strikers had won shorter work hours, better pay and the right to unionise.

International Women's Day was organised to mark the victory of the New York textile workers, and as a focus for women around the world to participate in demonstrations and other actions to win the right to vote. Across Europe, the US and Britain, millions of women and men took part in meetings and marches to demand women's suffrage.

In Nanking, China in 1912 the Woman Suffrage Alliance took up pistols and stormed parliament demanding equality of the sexes and recognition of women's right to vote.

The first IWD marches in Russia were held in 1913. In 1917 women took to the streets on International Women's Day sparking the February Revolution which eventually overthrew the Tsar and won female suffrage.

"Better to starve fighting than starve working" was the rallying call of more than 23,000 weavers (mostly women) in the US in 1912. Their pay had been suddenly cut, but after two months of a hard-fought strike they returned to work with pay increases of up to 20%.

The first IWD march in Australia took place in Sydney 1928, with demands for an eight-hour day, equal pay for equal work, paid annual leave and a living wage for the unemployed.

In 1937 during a sit-down strike against General Motors in Flint, Michigan in the US, while the men occupied the factory, the women organised support actions, including a 24-hour picket (defending themselves from the police with 2x4s) and preparing food for the strikers.

The victory was central to the move to unionise the industry and win better wages and conditions. It inspired others to organise. In New York in the same year the mostly women retail workers at Woolworths sat down until they won their demands for a 40-hour week, a $20 minimum weekly wage, an hour for lunch and union recognition. This time the men supported the women with food and blanket supplies! White Australian women won the right to vote early this century. It wasn't until Aboriginal citizenship was won in 1967 that this rudimentary right was generalised. But that wasn't enough to guarantee equal rights for women. A wave of protests, utilising street marches, sit-ins, strikes, public meetings and other creative forms of community action, broke out in the 1960s as women demanded the right to paid work and to join a union, to equal pay, child-care, legal safe abortion and to education.

Some of the gains of this period included:

• The removal in 1966 of the ban on married women working in the public service

• The adoption in 1972 of the principle of "equal pay for work of equal value"

• The entry of women into non-traditional ("men's") occupations such as tram-drivers in 1975 (after at least 20 years of agitation), builders (late '60s and early '70s), and workers in the steel industry (after an intense campaign in Wollongong) in 1973. (These advances often required women to not only struggle against bosses, but also against male workers and male-dominated unions which argued that women would take men's jobs and that women would drive down men's wages.)

• Access to abortion through the liberalisation of the laws of most states, beginning in Victoria with the Menherinit ruling in 1969;

• Funding for child-care

• The establishment of women-specific services like health centres, refuges and housing services

• The outlawing of discrimination on the basis of gender, marital status or pregnancy in the Sexual Discrimination Act of 1983.

Today all these gains are under attack. However, we don't need to be intimidated or demoralised. History has shown that women have fought for their rights before and won. This is a history to be proud of. Together we can defend our democratic right to child care, access to education and the right to control of our own bodies. Together we can fight for the environment, workers' rights and a non-racist society.

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